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Edson de Castro was the Product Manager of the pioneering PDP-8 at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a 12-bit computer generally considered by most to be the first true minicomputer.[2] De Castro was convinced that it was possible to improve upon the PDP-8 by building a 16-bit minicomputer with better performance and lower cost than the PDP-8.[3] de Castro left DEC[3] along with another hardware engineer, Richard Sogge, and a software engineer, Henry Burkhardt III, to found Data General (DG) in 1968.[4] The fourth founder, Herbert Richman, had been a salesman for Fairchild Semiconductor and knew the others through his contacts with Digital Equipment.[4]

In keeping with the PDP-8, the Nova was based on 15 by 15 inches (38 cm × 38 cm) printed circuit boards.[5][6] The boards were designed so they could be connected together using a printed circuit backplane, with minimal manual wiring, allowing all the boards to be built in an automated fashion. This greatly reduced costs over the traditional wire-wrapping technique.[7] The larger-board construction also made the Nova more reliable, which made it especially attractive for industrial or lab settings. Fairchild Semiconductor provided the new medium-scale integration (MSI) chips used throughout the system.[8][9] The Nova was one of the first 16-bit minicomputers and was a leader in moving to word lengths that were multiples of the 8-bitbyte in that market.

DG released the Nova in 1969 at a base price of US$3,995,[10] advertising it as "the best small computer in the world."[11] The basic model was not very useful out of the box, and adding RAM in the form of core memory typically brought the price up to $7,995. Starting in 1969, Data General shipped a total of 50,000 Novas at $8000 each.[12] The Nova’s biggest competition was from the new DEC PDP-11 computer series, and to a lesser extent the older DEC PDP-8 systems.[13] The Nova became popular in scientific and laboratory uses.[14][15][16]